drafty draft

Thinking of the Friday deadline and of all the other things I have to do in the coming week, I thought I’d try to put out a rough draft of what I’m thinking of proposing for our panel. It’s pretty much just a slightly expanded version of what I’ve already written about here. Let me know what you think.

Since I’m proposing to show two kinds of visualizations, this would fit into Jody’s “six decades, six ways” approach if you each want to take up two other views; otherwise, I’d be happy to adjust or differently scale what I’ve written here if you want to not have to add up to six.

I’d also be happy to take a stab (excuse the metaphor) at writing the introduction/overview of our panel. I went back through past blog entries/emails and was drawn to these questions that Jody wrote as a way of focusing our panel: “What have we learned from major waves made by rhetoricians and compositionists in the past 60 years?” “How might we think about pasts and futures in light of what various technologies (both new and not-so-new) allow us to do, to be, to think?”

By the way, I love the idea you mentioned in your last blog entry, Jody, of using the floor plans in the conference program to create a game experience of some kind, and of designing an alternative navigation for all those ads in the back of the program. These two elements of the conference and the program are completely familiar to everyone, and so actually talking about them and defamiliarizing them has the potential to yield some interesting insights and a-ha moments.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the drafty draft:

Zooming in and Out: Alternative Views of the CCCC

In this presentation, I demonstrate several visualizations of the CCCC—zooming in on the 2008 conference as well as zooming out so to view the fifty-nine previous conferences—in order to open this event to different perspectives and insights. Using tools developed by researchers in information visualization, a subfield of computer science that aims to visually represent non-physical data, I will create and discuss interactive views of some of the information generated in and around the CCCC.

Zooming in on the 2009 conference, I will present different ways of viewing the content of the program. Visualization tools found at TAPor and elsewhere allow for analysis and visual representation of text in the program—either the titles or abstracts (depending on availability) of all of the presentations—in order to discern key themes and preoccupations that cut across speakers and sessions, thereby presenting potential new ways of experiencing the conference itself. More generally, the recent development of interactive text visualization—of poetry and political speeches, in particular [I’ll fill in some references here]— can expand our understanding of visual rhetoric: our sense of the relation between text and image and of what we might learn by seeing text as image.

Zooming out to view the CCCC’s sixty year history, I will present a visualization that allows us to situate this conference historically and geographically. This visualization will display an interactive timeline that maps the cities in which the CCCC has been held over the past 60 years. Along with the location, other information for each year—such as the conference/keynote theme, the number of conference attendees, the cost of a hotel room, the number of students enrolled in post-secondary schools—will provide a way of understanding the development of this conference over the past six decades.[I’ll put in some references here to Tufte, Gapminder, and Trulia Hindsight.] [And here's where the clever closing sentence goes.]